Chapter 8 - The Office on the E-Ring
The office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon smelled of linoleum wax, green paper folders, and the specific, oily ozone that comes off high-volume digital plotters that have been running for twelve hours straight.
It was eight weeks after the commissioning.
The windows looked out over the Potomac toward the monuments: the needle of the Washington Monument cutting the January sky like a gray bone, and the low white dome of the Jefferson Memorial half-hidden behind the bare branches of the cherry trees.
My desk was steel, federal government standard, painted gray with four drawers that locked with a single brass key. On the blotter sat two telephones: a black administrative line that connected to the Navy yard in Anacostia, and a red secure terminal that had a four-digit extension linked directly to the operations briefing room on the second deck.
Beside the phone sat my nameplate:
LT. CDR. VALERIE ALDEN, USN
DIRECTOR, FLEET PROPULSION ASSURANCE
The door to the corridor opened with a soft, magnetic click.
Commander Vance walked in carrying an accordion file tied with white cotton tape. She had her sleeves rolled up two turns, her uniform shirt unbuttoned at the throat in the informal, working style of the CNO’s personal staff during non-briefing hours.
“The Norfolk docket came through from the Fourth Circuit,” she said, dropping the file onto the corner of my desk.
I didn't open it. I was looking at an engineering drawing for the heat-recovery boilers on the new frigate class, checking the wall thickness of the third-stage economizer tubes.
“What did the magistrate do?” I asked.
“Greg Bates entered a guilty plea to two counts of providing false statements in a federal procurement matter,” Vance said. She pulled up the wooden visitor’s chair and sat down with her ankles crossed. “He gets eighteen months at the federal correctional institution in Petersburg, with an order of restitution for eighty-four thousand dollars to cover the test cycles at Carderock.”
“And Marin?”
“The grand jury declined to indict on the conspiracy count,” Vance said. “The prosecutor determined that she was functionally an uncompensated agent of the LLC without administrative authority. But her name is on the federal debarment list. She can't hold a pass to any Department of Defense installation for five years, and the state licensing board in Richmond revoked her notary commission yesterday.”
“Where is she?”
“Living in an apartment in Virginia Beach,” Vance said. “Greg’s shop in Chesapeake was liquidated by the sheriff last Tuesday to satisfy the lease arrears. She’s working twenty hours a week as a receptionist at an orthodontic clinic near the mall.”
I picked up my drafting pencil, made a small red mark beside the welding symbol on the frigate drawing, and set it down.
“And my father?”
Vance paused. Her eyes shifted toward the window, watching a flight of four Sea Hawk helicopters banking low over the river toward the landing pad at Anacostia.
“He resigned from the board of the Naval League on Friday,” she said softly. “He sent a letter to the executive committee citing ‘age and personal health considerations.’ The commodores didn't ask him to stay.”
“Has he been to the club?”
“The manager told my brother that Captain Alden comes in on Thursdays at eleven,” Vance said. “He sits in the corner by the library, reads the Proceedings magazine for an hour, drinks two cups of decaf, and leaves before the lunch crowd comes in from the fleet headquarters. He doesn't wear the miniature medals anymore.”
I reached into the top drawer of the steel desk, pulled out a small, flat box of heavy white bond paper, and set it on the blotter.
Inside was an envelope, addressed in my father’s handwriting: that narrow, backward-slanting script that had been trained into three generations of aviators by the navigation schools at Pensacola.
It had arrived three days ago.
The postmark was Virginia Beach, January fourth.
There was no letter inside.
There was only a single, three-by-five black-and-white photograph, taken in nineteen-ninety-four on the pier at Naval Station San Diego.
It showed me at seven years old, wearing an oversized sailor hat that had belonged to one of his ensigns, sitting on the engine cowling of an A-6 Intruder while he stood on the boarding ladder with his flight helmet under his arm and his broad, broken-nosed smile turned toward the camera.
On the back, written with an old fountain pen that had leaked a tiny circle of blue ink into the corner, were six words:
You were always the better sailor.
I picked up the photograph, looked at the small, dark-haired girl whose back had never known the heat of five-hundred-pound steam, and then laid it down beside the frigate plans.
“Vance,” I said.
“Yes, Valerie?”
“The third-stage tubes on this economizer are thirty-thousandths too thin,” I said, pointing the drafting pencil at the red mark. “If the contractor uses that alloy in the Red Sea, the sulfur in the bunker fuel will pit through the wall in ninety days.”
She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing as she looked at the technical drawing.
“Who approved the drawing?” she asked.
“A commander in the acquisition directorate who hasn't been to sea since twenty-sixteen,” I said.
“What do you want to do?”
I stood up, pulled the four-star Admiral’s coat from the back of my chair—my own coat now, altered by the master tailor at the Navy Yard to carry the two silver oak leaves of a commander on the sleeves—and slipped my arms into the heavy wool.
May you like
“Get your cover, Vance,” I said, picking up the frigate plans and rolling them into a tight, three-inch cylinder. “We’re going to the third deck. It’s time someone taught the acquisition directorate how to read a steam table.”
We walked out into the long, gray-carpeted corridor of the E-Ring, our oxfords clicking in unison against the floor, our shoulders level, our chins up, heading toward the center of the building where the four-stars kept the clocks running and the fleet was waiting for the orders to clear.
